The company maintains its operational and engineering offices in Overland Park, Kansas.

History

Sprint

The Sprint Corporation was founded in 1899 by Cleyson Leroy Brown under the Brown Telephone Company in the small town of Abilene, Kansas. The company was a landline telephone company that operated as a competitor to the Bell System.

In the mid 20th century, Brown changed its name to United Utilities. That company changed its name to United Telecommunications in 1972, as it began to offer a more diversified product range.

Southern Pacific Communications Company (SPCC), a unit of the Southern Pacific Railroad began offering their dial-up service shortly after the Execunet II decision late in 1978. The Railroad had extensive rights of way that could be used to lay long-distance communications. Prior attempts at offering long distance service were not approved by the Federal Communications Commission, though the company's fax service (SpeedFAX) had been permitted. SPC was headquartered in Burlingame, California (where Sprint still maintains a small presence on Adrian Ct.). According to company employees, Sprint was a name chosen by a contest sponsored within the company by Rex Hollis, the VP of Marketing at the time. It was an acronym for "Southern Pacific Railroad INTegration".

Southern Pacific Communications became part of GTE in 1982. In 1986, Sprint was merged with US Telecom (the long distance arm of United Telecom) to form US Sprint. This was a partnership owned by GTE and United Telecom. In 1989 United Telecom purchased controlling interest in US Sprint. In 1991 United Telecom completed its acquisition of US Sprint. That same year United Telecom changed its name to Sprint.

In 1993, Sprint acquired Centel, which allowed Sprint to provide local service in a total of 18 states.

In 1995, the company began to offer wireless service under the Sprint PCS brand.

On October 5, 1999 Sprint and MCI WorldCom announced a $129 Billion dollar merger agreement between the two companies. The deal would have been the largest corporate merger in history at the time. However the deal did not go through because of pressure from the United States Department of Justice and the European Union on concerns of it creating a monopoly.

In 2003, Sprint began recombining their local telecom, long distance, wireline, and wireless business units into a new company, marketing the combined company as "One Sprint". In April 2004, the separately-traded wireless tracking stock, "PCS", was absorbed into the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) "FON" ticker symbol, Sprint's former ticker symbol. (FON stood for "Fiber Optic Network", which was Sprint's bragging right, but was also a homophone of the word "phone").